Never mind the quality, feel the gigabytes

Here in England it's a Bank Holiday weekend, which for those of you outside the UK means a national holiday in which people tackle home improvement projects quite beyond their capabilities or queue in endless streams of traffic to go to beaches packed with people huddled miserably over sandwiches now containing real sand as the wind lashes them with the driving rain.  It's a cultural thing.

So as usual I'm having a Bank Holiday Bonanza and giving away free copies of Looking for Buttons on Amazon.

Which is fine, except I'm not really sure anyone actually reads them.

When books are so cheap, even free, you can pretty much download as many as you like, memory permitting.  Never mind the quality, feel the gigabytes.  But when it's so easy to pile up the words, it loses meaning.  You get the buzz of a download without the deep financial commitment of, say, an enormous hardback to compel you to actually read the books you've amassed so avidly.

I might shift a few hundred books during this promo if I'm lucky but those stats are meaningless if no-one gets any enjoyment out of it beyond those fleeting seconds of the download rush.

So if you're reading this I hope you're here because you've read the book and you've enjoyed it.

Please tell me if you have.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to find my adjustable spanner...

This passes for a thought process, apparently

I was going to write something terribly interesting (or perhaps merely terrible) about writing and technology but that can wait.  I'm going to rave about someone else's book instead.

There are many ways I choose what to read, ranging from browsing idly to discovering something by an author whose work I've enjoyed before to a sudden craving for an old favourite.  And then there's the method which is more me than any other: going off at a tangent.

In the past this has led to some fantastic finds, particiularly when I've applied the priniciple to music (an interest in David Bowie's more obscure work leading to Iggy Pop singing Belgian jazz, for example).  The book I'm reading now is one I came across originally as part of a gift set when I was a student, which I suppose comes under idle browsing because I liked the look of the set but couldn't get to the blurb.  And it's an old favourite, establishing itself as such on first reading as one of the books I wish I'd written (although to have done so I'd have to been a) much older and b) deceased by now, which would make this blog marginally more interesting).  But I've come back to it through a classic piece of tangentery.  I shall take you through it in stages so you can tell if you too choose books by this method.

1. Over the Christmas holiday, the 1983 film Wargames was on TV.  I knew I'd loved it as a kid but couldn't remember enough about it to know why.  About ninety minutes in, John Wood turned up and I realised that was why, he'd made a huge impression on me when I was about nine.

2. So after the film I tried to think what else I'd seen him in, which meant a browse on the Internet Movie Database, very useful for settling 'oh, it's whatersname from thingy, oh you know, no, not her, you fool' arguments in our house.

3. And I saw that in the 1960s he'd been in an adaptation of Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop, playing the poet Richard Cadogan.

4. Richard Cadogan is one of my Fictional Men For Whom I Have A Soft Spot.

5. John Wood would have been excellent in the role.

6. The series does not seem available to watch now.

7. Therefore I am rereading The Moving Toyshop and it is every bit as good as I remembered - and it's been a while since I read it so a lot of it is coming to me almost as new and it is a huge treat.

So, in a roundabout way that is no kind of useful review at all, I recommend that you try Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen novels, solving Oxford crimes decades before Inspector Morse while wearing an extraordinary hat.  Except Swan Song because that wasn't as good as the others.

Which brings me back, in a tortuously roundabout way, to my original question.  How do you choose your books?  Do tell...

Radio Ga Ga

Writing's a funny pastime.  You'd think all types (if you'll forgive the pun) of story would be the same, but it doesn't work like that.  At least, it doesn't for me.  Some come out as prose, others don't want to work that way and insist on attempting to be drama, and some are amenable enough to let me try them out in different ways.

A confession: I have had a lifelong love affair with the spoken word.  As a child I listened to my favourite stories over and over again on LP and cassette (oh, just google them, young people, I'm not going to digress now).  I spent teenage illnesses in bed listening to Journey Into Space (a repeat, I hasten to add - I'm not quite that old).  And had BBC Radio 7 (now Radio 4 Extra) not launched when it did, I'd have finished my thesis a year earlier instead of losing hours pretending to study simulation results while listening agog to Fatherland and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, headphones clamped over my unkempt studenty hair.  Which is why, despite its stubborn refusal to turn into anything coherent, I have persisted with the Difficult Second Novel.  It may not be working as a book, went my reasoning, but perhaps it would work for radio.  Perhaps the problem was that I was trying to tell the story in the wrong way.

So I'd poke and I'd prod and I'd try to work out the casting and play it in my head and still the damn thing wouldn't come.  And then last night I pulled at the threads again after a gap of nearly a year, expecting the knots to bite harder, becoming more intractable and impossible to resolve than ever, only this time I tugged from a slightly different angle and suddenly there I was, standing in a windswept garden near midnight (I'm not being poetical, I was out in all that rotten weather) with an armful of yarn that needs knitting into a workable narrative (yeah, that was the poetic bit).  And I think it's going to be a novel after all, not a radio play.

Which is a Good Thing, of course, but I've been so set on hearing this one rather than reading it that I'll have to get it published, just so I can have it as an audiobook.  Can I have Anton Lesser reading it, please?

Pottering on

I feel sorry for J.K. Rowling.

Writing a book is hard.  It takes time and effort and a lot of emotional investment.  I should think every author worries if anyone will want to read their book, let alone actually like it.  Now imagine the pressure of being so famous and so successful.  Either people will be desperate to read your book and vocal in their disappointment if it doesn't meet their impossibly high expectations, or they'll be desperate for you to be seen to fail just because you're so famous and so successful.

There is no way Rowling will get an unbiased review.  Every reader who has heard of Rowling or of Harry Potter will come to The Casual Vacancy with some sort of agenda.  So, yes, I feel sorry for a very successful author.

There's a moral here for us minnows: be careful what you wish for.

Literary networking the Lucie Parish way

One of my biggest regrets about my undergraduate life (apart from studying a subject I didn't much care for in the deluded hope that it would improve my employment prospects, says she, laughing hollowly) was that I avoided Jilly Cooper.

I was shopping with a friend one Saturday.  We drifted into W.H. Smith.  There was Jilly Cooper, PR lady at her side, sitting at a table piled high with copies of her latest novel.  My friend, a great fan, was very excited and decided to get a signed book for her mum's birthday present.  At the time, I had never read any of her novels (this was at the peak of my Alistair MacLean phase).  I felt so ashamed at the thought of coming face to face with a very famous author and admitting I'd never even read so much as a blurb that I bolted out of the shop and lurked outside until my friend reappeared, clutching her trophy.

Since then I've read and enjoyed Mrs Cooper's books (I can't call her Jilly, that would be presumptous, given my behaviour).  Flatteringly, but ludicrously, Looking for Buttons has been compared to her early novels.  Yesterday I read an interview with her in the Times (to which I can't link as it's a subscription-only site) in which she championed character and good writing and generally came across as a thoroughly good egg.  I've been kicking myself about the W.H. Smith incident ever since.

Some years later, I saw Joanna Trollope sitting alone at a signing in my local Waterstone's.  I'd read and enjoyed her books.  I was too skint to buy one and too shy to approach her to say I loved her work, so I just scuttled off instead.

I am so very, very bad at treating published authors as human beings.  It's just as well that Looking for Buttons is only available as an e-book.  If I had a signing I'd be too embarrassed to turn up.




[This weekend, it's a Bank Holiday Bonanza!  Get Looking for Buttons FREE from Amazon from Saturday 25th to Monday 27th August!  It's the last giveaway I'll be holding for a while so make the most of it.]

Facing up to the publicity game

Life gets slightly weird when you publish a book.  Today I was invited to make a guest appearance on a website to promote Looking for Buttons.  Fabulous.  Except I need to provide an author photo.

Ah.

As I've said before, I'm not photogenic.  It's been over a year since I last had my picture taken, unawares, and when I saw it posted on Facebook I wailed about my Cold War-era Eastern Bloc shotputter's arms and pleaded for it to be taken down.  I can only think of one set of recent(ish) photos I can bear to look at, and then I was wearing a furry lion suit to entertain small children at my local library.

I started to wonder when this image-hungry world started to drag an author's mugshot into prominence.   Surely it's a modern phenomenon.  If I looked along my bookcase (or in fact gingerly peered at the teetering overflow pile in front of it, currently nearing six feet high), surely I would find faceless authors.

A random selection:  Terry Pratchett - photo inside cover.  John Buchan - photo on back cover.  Ngaio Marsh - photo on back cover.  Adam Hall - photo on inside flap of dustjacket.  Mervyn Peake - wonderful artist, self-portraits.  OK, maybe it's a twentieth century phenomenon.  Go back further.  Charlotte Bronte - painting by her brother.  Charles Dickens - used to be on a banknote.   Further still.  Christopher Marlowe - the Corpus Christi portait, might be him, might not, great image anyhow so who cares?  I can put a face to almost every author in my collection.  People like to know who they're reading.  I'm no different, so I really can't deny that an author photo is going to become necessary at some point.

But will anybody accept a lion who writes romantic comedies?

You know how to whistle, don't you?

If you'd asked me about feedback ten years ago, I'd have launched into an explanation of how amplified sound leaving a loudspeaker is picked up by the microphone, causing a cycle of further amplification until you get the whistling screech familiar at rock concerts or near a hearing aid wearer.  Possibly I'd have drawn a diagram.  If you'd asked me on a day when things were going particularly badly, I'd probably have gibbered into my copy of Fundamentals of Acoustics and lapsed into miserable silence while scrolling through the vintage jewellery listings on eBay.

But those days are behind me now and today I'm more concerned with feedback from readers.  Yesterday a friend told me I had my first US review on Amazon.  I was a little nervous.  I don't know anyone in the States so this was my first review by a complete stranger.  Eventually I plucked up the courage to read it and it was far kinder than I'd dared hope.  This was A Relief.

Writing is a solitary pursuit.  It's easy to lose all perspective over whether what you write is any good or not, and it gets worse once you've had a few knockbacks from literary agents (although I still cherish the rejection letter than described Looking for Buttons as "well-written and perceptive").  Until now, only friends had judged the book and, delusional though I am, I could not regard their opinions as totally unbiased.  But now Looking for Buttons is out there, fending for itself, being read and, I hope, enjoyed by people I will never meet.  I hope that some of them will tell me what they think.

Until then, I'll just have to whistle to myself.

At the end of the day, you need clichés

Flick through any guide to writing and the chances are you'll come across advice along the lines of 'Avoid clichés like the plague'.  Good advice, but I think that clichés can be useful shortcuts if you handle them properly.

Chick-lit is commonly held to be a grab-bag of hackneyed characters and scenarios: the ditzy heroine, always unlucky in love; the unobtainable perfect man; the all-too obtainable wrong 'un; the wisecracking best friend; the difficult relationship with a parent; the misunderstandings and complications that drive the plot along.

Having written that, my first thought was, "Oh hell, how high does Looking for Buttons score on the clichéometer?"  My second, gingerly relieved thought, was that this is the whole point of this post.  Yes, there are familiar people and scenarios but using something familiar doesn't make it dull (I hope).  The general framework is familiar, I grant you.  That's what the reader wants, that's what tells them it's their sort of book.  It's what you do within that framework that makes the difference.

When you take a romantic comedy and boil it down, you end up with a fairytale, shorn of its gorier elements.  We're brought up on fairytales.  Is it any wonder that we still want to read them when (if) we grow up?

Books offer us a happy ever after.  If you have to resort to a kind of cultural shorthand to reach that point, is that so very wrong?

[PS  This blog has just passed a thousand hits.  Thank you very much for reading it.]

Freebie Friday - the aftermath

I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I put Looking for Buttons on a free promotion yesterday.  I hoped to get some more readers and to get some feedback - and, with luck, some positive reviews.  (My sole, cherished, five-star Amazon review is very kind - but the reviewer is an old friend and I'm not sure how much her kindness can be put down to liking the book and how much to the fear that I  might turn up at her house and wail plaintively through the letterbox if she said she hated it.)  I suppose what I wanted was to find out if there was a market for the book at all.

I checked the book's progress mid-afternoon and it had shifted a couple of hundred copies.  I was pleased with that.

I checked again just before I went to bed.  Looking for Buttons was at number ten on Amazon's free Kindle book Humour chart.  As I stared, it moved up to number nine.  It was at number 147 on the general chart.

Through sheer ill luck I wasn't able to log on to check the book's performance before the promotion ended this morning, so I don't know where it finished in the Humour chart, but the stats I could access showed it ended the promotion at number 111 overall.  In one day, nearly a thousand people worldwide had downloaded Looking for Buttons.  I'm still boggling about that.  Hopefully, some of them will actually like it and recommend it to other people.

I'm told word of mouth is the secret to marketing an indie book successfully.  I really hope that's true.  If I start to see an improvement in sales, I'll consider holding another free promotion.  Watch this space.

Friday Freebie!

Only time for a quick post today, but it's a good 'un.

From 9 a.m. (if I've got the conversion right - midnight if you're on Pacific Time in the USA) on Friday 3rd August, for one day only, Looking for Buttons is free.

DOWNLOAD IT FREE ON 3rd AUGUST

A rather angsty post

I am having a bit of wobble at the moment.  Technically, I should be all smiles.  Looking for Buttons is out in the world, selling fairly steadily.  I am A Published Writer, albeit a DIY one.

But.

But but but but but.

It's said that everyone has a book in them.  What if Looking for Buttons is the only one I have?

I want to write.  It's what I do, spinning yarns when I'm not knitting them.  That's the image I've always had of myself.  But when I sit down at the keyboard I can't string a coherent sentence together.  I've re-read what exists of the Difficult Second and Third Novels.  They seem to have been written by someone else.  It's like watching Bradley Wiggins win the Tour de France.  I can ride a bike but no way could I do that.  I get the same feeling as I run my eye along the bookcase.  I've lost my writing nerve and with it part of my identity.

I hope this is just a temporary blip.

Such stuff that dreams are made on

My subconscious is a strange place.  I don't know if everyone does this, or it's just me, but I dream in narrative.  Several times I've woken in the night lunging for a pen before I lose whatever gem of a plot has just spooled before my mind's eye.  Occasionally it still holds up the next morning.  Once I got a half-decent opening scene for a thriller and on another maddening occasion I awoke knowing I'd just imagined an entire episode of Spooks.  It had been rather exciting (which perhaps should have alerted me to the fact that I was dreaming) but I couldn't remember anything else about it.

Now it seems the shadowy (and probably very dusty) recesses of what passes for my mind are dwelling on the world of e-books.  When I woke at half past three this morning I had been dreaming of reading an article on e-books.  There were two points that struck me:

1. Any woman seen with an e-reader in public at the moment will be assumed to be reading porn.
2. What are the long-term implications for charity shops?  Second-hand bookshops, too, although those seem to be like hen's teeth round my way.  If e-books come to dominate the market, donations to charity shops will dwindle.  I still haven't got an e-reader (hypocrite! I hear you cry) but I imagine that once you've read a book you don't want to read again it's just deleted.  If it was a paper book (I was going to write 'proper book', but that's surely opening up a can of worms best left undisturbed by an indie author) it would, I hope, end up being passed on rather than binned.  I don't have any statistics, but I should think books bring in a steady revenue for charities.  Even people who actively avoid manically over-familiar persons in aggressively bright tabards may end up handing over a fair bit of cash to charity in their thirst for reading matter.  What happens when they no longer have a reason to cross the threshold for a browse?

I was so struck by these points that, in my dream, I began to read the article aloud to my mother.  As is the way of dreams, at this point the article became one about market gardening, written phonetically in an obscure Scottish dialect, and as such became irrelevant to this post.

I'm still worried about what reading a Kindle on the train would do for my street cred, though.

Heyer today...

When you find a writing style that works for you, it's very tempting to stick with it.  That's fair enough.  Developing a distinctive voice is part of maturing as a writer.  And perhaps one day your book will be published and you start to think about what comes next.  The question then is whether you've got more than one book in you.  Maybe you have, maybe you haven't.  But what if your readers just want the same book over and over again?

At the moment I am trying to read my way through my bookcase overflow pile, mainly for health and safety reasons as it's taller than I am.  I'm being very strict.  Once I've read a book it goes to charity, unless I have a compelling reason to keep it (i.e. it's written by Adam Hall, my hero - and yes, I'm aware that he might not be the obvious inspiration to a romance writer, but nevertheless, he was the guv'nor).  The last book but three was a Georgette Heyer.  I've read a fair few of her books over the years and time and again the same characters crop up: the sensible heroine, usually grey-eyed and on the verge of being left on the shelf; the semi-rakish hero, rich, titled and needing to be taken down a peg or two; the daffy ingenue; the young rascal; the bitchy socialite; the scheming in-law.  I need to be more scientific and read them in publication order, because I can't yet tell if she was writing to a formula or if she just got trapped by her own popularity.

I'm not necessarily complaining that the books sometimes seem a little formulaic.  The best ones are very good indeed and had me willing the hero and heroine to get together (I loved Sylvester).  They're well-written and entertaining, with an extensive lexicon of Regency slang (ever been "bosky as a wheelbarrow"?), and sometimes it's nice to know what you're getting.  But it's interesting all the same.  A little further down the now-teetering overflow pile is one of Heyer's crime novels.  I'm looking forward to seeing how she tackled that genre.

I have a bet with myself that the heroine will have grey eyes.

Romance: the proof is in the reading

Writing a romance should be easy.  You take a man and a woman, throw in a few complications, shake it about a bit et voila!  Only I don't think it works like that.

I've read books that have made me swoon.  I've read a fair few more that have led me to consider lobbying for book-throwing to be considered an Olympic sport.  In almost every case, the problem was the same.  The protagonists were annoying.  In the far off days when I made a point of finishing every book I started, Wuthering Heights nearly brought on apoplexy.  Now I recognise that it is regarded as a classic, but Cathy and Heathcliffe irritated me beyond endurance (I was nineteen at the time, an age when I would have expected star-crossed lovers to appeal).  On the other hand, I've rooted all the way through an Alistair MacLean thriller for the hero to get the girl and had my heartstrings well and truly yanked when she didn't make it to the final page in one piece.

So is it just a matter of taste in the reader or is there something more to it?  What makes one pairing iconic and another moronic?

Anybody want to share their favourite couples here?

A spell of casting

These days, if you ask a writer whether they've given any thought to the casting of a film or TV adaptation of their book and they say no, they're probably lying.

I've played the game with Looking for Buttons, bouncing various actors off friends (not literally, I must add, however much my friends would wish it otherwise).  And no, I'm not going to tell you who plays who.  But in my head the characters are real.  They don't look or sound like anyone else.

With the Difficult Second Novel, things are a little different.  Being bogged down with the plot, I've tried various ways of getting back on track.  One of these has been reworking the text as a script for radio or film.  It helps a little, in as much as adaptations have to leave a lot out so I have to cut to the bare bones of the story.  In theory this means I should have a clearer idea of which sub-plots are complicating matters needlessly.  In practice I'm still a little confused, but at least I know why.

The casting was proving problematic when I tried to replay these scripts in my head.  No-one seemed quite right.  Then the other night I had a minor revelation.  The DSN is set round about 1978 so (insert fanfare here) I need to cast it as it would have been done in 1978.

So I've done a preliminary casting (all those hours spent watching 1970s anthology box sets have not been wasted) and now when I work through the early parts of the book the pictures in my head have that slightly washed out look of seventies film.  It's not like Life On Mars.  This is a proper seventies production, possibly preceded by the Thames TV logo.  The soundtrack relies perhaps a little too much on wah-wah guitar and a hyperactive brass section.  The cast all have iffy hairstyles and there is a lot of brown floral wallpaper.  It is, in short, my idea of heaven and I can't wait to watch it.

So now all I've got to do is get on and write the damn thing.  And then build a time machine.

The pros and cons of sticking with what you know

I have a confession to make: I haven't actually written anything new since last year.  I'd lost confidence and had pretty much decided to call it a day.  However, the same compulsion that has been known to find me scribbling by torchlight at three in the morning led me to have one last try.  I'd put Looking for Buttons on Amazon as a Kindle e-book and if no-one bought it, that would be the end of my writing career.  To my delighted surprise, people are buying it.  (Thank you!)

And suddenly I've started writing again.  There's this blog and random appearances on Twitter as looking4buttons, and then, very late last night, I dug out part of the Difficult Second Novel.  I read it with a little difficulty, as the only reason the laptop was still on was that I'd been lying in the dark to catch up with the fabulously titled Before the Screaming Begins on BBC iPlayer and hadn't got my glasses on.  Even so, as I squinted at the screen, I realised it wasn't as bad as I'd thought.  It was written so long ago I was coming to it fresh and I found I wanted to know what happens next (it would help considerably if I've got to write it).  Better still, the narrator's voice was completely distinct from Looking for Buttons's Kate Harper.  The book seems to be a runner after all.

Which puts me in a dilemma.  Should I dust off the first ten chapters of the Difficult Second Novel and try to produce the rest of the book, or should I keep it on the back burner and carry on with the Difficult Third Novel, currently standing at a chapter and a half?  The DTN is probably going to end up falling broadly into the romance genre, meaning I could pitch it to the Looking for Buttons audience, hopefully resulting in a book that sells.  The DSN, however, is a thriller set in the 1970s, requiring a different pseudonym and a lot of research (watching re-runs of The Professionals is research, really it is, not an obsession at all, no).

I need to make a decision and soon.  Inside my head I can hear Gladys Knight and the Pips singing Come Back And Finish What You Started.  I can't decide if that's a sign that I need to take up the Difficult Second Novel once more or if my subconscious is desperate to hear a bit of Motown.

Keeping reality at bay

One of the joys of fiction is that it can transport you utterly to another place, another time, even inside the mind of another person.  However, the alchemy is a fragile process and it doesn't take much to shatter it.  Sometimes all it takes is a tiny reminder of the outside world.

The means of communication used by the characters in Looking for Buttons may strike some readers as a little behind the times: they text and e-mail and sometimes (heaven forfend!) actually talk to each other.  No-one tweets or posts status updates to Facebook.  This was deliberate.  It is not just that I am a dinosaur (an eleanorbrontesaurus, perhaps).  As I wrote, I was aware that techonology moves on apace and using the wrong gadget would date it far more than the actions of the characters.  (One of my guinea pigs was quick to point out that at one point Kate Harper, the narrator, was watching a video rather than a DVD.  I didn't even consider bringing Blu-Ray into it.)  Even so, I'd far rather that someone thought I was a little old-fashioned than be jolted out of the book completely by something being so odd that it made them question the workings of the world within the book.

And what prompted this post?  It wasn't even a book I've read.  No, it's the behemoth that is Fifty Shade of Grey (again).  And the thought that is going to prevent me ever being able to buy into the story, should I read it, is this:

What does Christian Grey's cleaner think of it all?  Or does he dust his dungeon himself?

It never does to have a practical nature when dealing with escapist fiction.

Just something I lashed up

Today I'm going to write about Fifty Shades of Grey.  I haven't read it, but everyone else seems to have an opinion so I'd better jump onto the bandwagon while it's in town.

So here's my take on the female population's sudden desire to read about being tied down while a capable man does all manner of things to them:

For the past however many years, women have been trying to Have It All.  They're knackered.  It's no wonder their ultimate fantasy is to lie down while someone else does all the work.

Starry-eyed

Looking for Buttons has received its first Amazon review.

Five stars.

If this self-publishing lark becomes any more exciting I'm going to have to lie down with a damp cloth on my forehead.

Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking...

Looking for Buttons has been on sale for two days.  So far I've sold six copies, which might not sound like many but feels like a huge triumph.  That's six whole people who've looked at the cover, read the blurb and thought "Yeah, I'll give that a go, and what's more, I'll pay for the privilege."  I find that wildly exciting.  (It is true that I don't get out much.)

What's more, it's already taking on a life of its own, thanks to friends using Facebook and Twitter to spread the word.  Twinkle Mummy has been badgering members of her local twins club to buy it and Norfolkbookworm has blogged about it, not once but twice!  (Norfolkbookworm, I must confess, is not entirely impartial.  She's been a good friend for over twenty years, has been one of Looking for Buttons's staunchest supporters, and roped in her very talented dad to do the cover!)

While I'm handing out the laurels, I must thank the inspirational Lexi Revellian who has been so generous with advice and support.  Her books, including the best-selling Remix and Replica, are great reads and her writing blog is a goldmine of information for the aspiring self-publisher.

Lastly, I must thank my late aunt and uncle.  They gave me my first PC some years ago, thinking it would help me study.  I wrote a book on it instead.  This book.  They're not here to see it published but I hope they would be pleased.